Reflective articles on spiritual life in Hinduism and Kannada lingayat literature.

This is certainly one of the most beautiful books in philosophy published in the last couple of years. It comprises eighty-four essays, carefully selected, well-translated, covering almost the full range of Croce's immense literary production. Croce is certainly one of the most important and influential thinkers of this century and in this huge anthology the English-speaking reader is given an incomparable instrument to get acquainted with him. The list of the headings which classify the eighty-four essays are: The Logic of (...) Philosophy; Philosophical Criticism; Aesthetics; The Philosophy of Art and Language; The Theory of History; Economics and Ethics; Essays in Criticism and Literary History; Moral and Political History. But first one should read the late Cecil Sprigge's excellent introduction.—M. J. V. (shrink)

Marsh borrows Richard McKeon's methodological notion of the "problematic" approach to intellectual history. Concentrating on their dialectical character, English criticism from 1650-1800 is explored in the writings of the third Earl of Shaftesbury, Mark Akenside, David Hartley, and James Harris.—D. J. B.

Dilemma one, Between the theoretical concepts and authorial intention -- Dilemma two, Good manners and eristic -- Dilemma three, Between strangeness and familiarity -- Dilemma four, Between scholarly research and faith.

Festschrift honoring Swami Balagangadharnath, b. 1945, religious head from Śrī Ādicuñcanagiri Mahāsaṃsthāna Maṭha, Lingayat monastery; comprises contributed articles, chiefly on Hindu philosophy and a few on Kannada literature.

On alienation in 20th century Indic poetry in English.

Why have poets played such an important role for contemporary philosophers? How can poetry link philosophy and political theory? How do formal considerations intersect with philosophical approaches? These essays seek to establish a dialogue between poetry and philosophy. Each essay contributes to our understanding of the relationships between theory and lived experience while providing new insight into important poets such as Charles Baudelaire, Stéphane Mallarmé, Victor Hugo, and others. The broad range of metaphysical, phenomenological, aesthetic, and ethical approaches announce important (...) new paths for a reinvigorated study of lyric poetry in the decades to come. (shrink)

continent. 2.1 (2012): 29–35. Translated by Vincent W.J. van Gerven Oei from Jeroen Mettes. "Politieke Poëzie: Enige aantekeningen, Poëtica bij N30 (versie 2006)." In Weerstandbeleid: Nieuwe kritiek . Amsterdam: De wereldbibliotheek, 2011. Published with permission of Uitgeverij Wereldbibliotheek, Amsterdam. L’égalité veut d’autres lois . —Eugène Pottier The modern poem does not have form but consistency (that is sensed), no content but a problem (that is developed). Consistency + problem = composition. The problem of modern poetry is capitalism. Capitalism—which has no (...) image: the unrepresentable Idea of “everything.” The problem is that a poem cannot be justified. There is no excuse for it. Political poetry— pure poetry—has to be problematic, though not in a mannerist way. Yes, its problem is first its own problem—poetry’s existence in the same world as the newspaper—but therefore also always everybody’s problem (the problem of any world at all). The cult of the sublime points at a suspect desire for transcendence, nostalgia for paradise lost (the womb?). Melancholia of the post-. But a problem neither sorrows nor mourns, it is alive, and the fact that it is alive is the problem—the problem for death (rigidity, the status quo). Our symbols and ideologies do not hide any god: symbolic = state; imaginary = human; real = money. Problem: the possibility of communal speech (poetry) in the absence of a “we.” Or: what is a “we” that is not a collective subject (or in any case is not a volonté générale )? What is a universal history that is not a History? This work was started in the shade of the anti-globalization protests at the end of November 1999. I considered N30 to be the closure of the nineties, of my adolescence, and of the a seemingly total extinction of social desire. From the beginning I was skeptical about the alterglobalization movement as the avant-garde of a new politics, but something was happening . Maybe this event did not show that, as the slogan would have it, “another world” is possible, but for me it indicated that such possibility was at least still possible. That naked possibility is carrying forward. And if the fundamental tone of this work sounds more desperate than utopian, this is not caused by the catastrophic sequence that since 1999 has plunged us ever deeper into the right-wing nightmare—a nightmare that this work also gives an account for—but because my hope as yet remains empty. Composition . Composition is no design, but the production of an autonomous block of affects (i.e. a POEM), rhythmically subtracted from the language of a community. A poem does something. Is something. New Sentence . Choosing the non sequitur as compositional unit has the advantage that an abstract composition is subjected to the stress of concrete, social references. Where there is a sentence, there is always a world. (This does not hold necessarily for words on their own.) And where sentences collide, something akin to a textual civil war takes place. It is not about “undermining” whatever, or de-scribing the raging global civil war, but about writing social (or even: ontological) antagonism -- including all its catastrophic and utopian possibilities. Minor resistance. Why would poetry be the no protest zone par excellence? It is nothing but protest, not simply qua “content,” but in its most fundamental essence: rhythm. Rhythm is resistance against language, time, and space, and the basis of (what we will continue to call) autonomy. Rhythm starts with the anti-rhythmic caesura as Hölderlin remarked about Sophocles, a disruption of the quotidian drone. The destruction of everything that is dead inside of us. The noise of the avant-garde has never been the representation of the noise of (post)modernity (from the television or shopping mall), but the sober noise of the systematic exchange of an unbearable worldview. The poet does not describe, but looks for a way out: There is a Grain of Sand in Lambeth that Satan cannot find Nor can his Watch Fiends find it, tis translucent & has many Angles But he who finds it will find Oothoons palace, for within Opening into Beulah every angle is a lovely heaven William Blake was not mad. And there has always been only one poetry: the poetry of paradise. The principle is that there is something in art (the essentially creative element) that is disgusted by that which, unlike art, does not aim for the supreme. Wonder is not supreme, tranquility is not supreme, beauty is not supreme. Even amusement is not supreme! The supreme is supremely open, “das Einfache,/ Das Schwer zu machen ist” 1 : paradise. That is abstract. Literally. For me it is not about a concrete imagination, an idyll or utopia. There is no doubt a need for that, but it is not so much the supposed lack of imagination or ideals (human rights are ideals), but a fundamental lack of desire (human rights are no desires) that we suffer from, and from which we do not need to remove Nietzsche’s label of “nihilism.” “We.” George Oppen: “ Of Being Numerous asks the question whether or not we can deal with humanity as something which actually exists.” What is less actual than humanity? Nowadays it appears as a lifeless ideology of cynical power politics. Or as what makes one think. It is a shame to be human. The event is the caesura that defines rhythm. Writing toward the event is not the description of the event, but marking an abstract and intense space in which the event may unfold and keep itself. It is a task. “Remember that thou blesseth the day on which I seized thee, because such is thy obligation.” The event is a contraction (or a series of contractions) with its own rhythm and unique qualities. It is more than an explosion or demonstration. But at the same time less. The endless repetition of images and stories in the media points to a fear for the indeterminate and indeterminable void of the event. In the end there is nothing to see. We do not live in disaster’s shade or miracle’s light, but rather in the rhythm, which is contracted time, having little to do with omnipresent representations. For this book I did not intend a rhythm of evental representations (a narrative rhythm), but a rhythm which would be an event itself , because it draws the border between artwork and history. My desire for a direct engagement with the “extra-textual reality” has nothing to do with the representation of “rumor in the streets.” (What has less street cred than representation?) Naturally, a poem is no historical event and does not change anything. But a poem is a part of history that wants to be repeated forever, constructed in such a way that it is worthy of repetition. It is a part of desire (composition) made consistent (durable). The “historical event” flares up and burns down, and has to burn down to be effective. The leftovers are images and stories (representations), History—no event. The artwork—that is the ambition— remains event (though monumental and inefficient/inoperable). (No wonder that a historical singularity, a revolution, reminds us of a work of art; the resurrection yearns for a judgment, an affirmation; everything depends on it.) Hence the title does not summarize the book, let alone contract its “content” into a quasi-transcendental signifier. The title is juxtaposed to the book, like everything else inside the book, and in that relation it precisely forms a part of it. The ideal work is an open whole, lacking nothing but to which everything may be added. I have been interested in this “everything,” the world, or as I said above: capitalism. “Everything” is not the space for “wonder”—a code word, a shibboleth for petty bourgeois imagination (I recognize myself in the strangest things, a speaking dog, a canal, a pond standing straight—oh my god). No. The world is a social world, not YOUR world, poet. Power is number one. I will call “Dutch,” or “shitty,” whatever denies this power. That hurts, but this pain is an expression of the desire in the world to write another world, or as Blanchot says, “the other of all worlds” 2 : the world. Not as what “is there,” but rather as that which urges for an escape from what “is.” This is a testament of how radical reality has become, for me—or rather, a writing body—in a having-been-written. I am not interested in the problem of “meaning” as misunderstood by literary scholarsi: “order” in “chaos,” “symbolization.” Bullshit. What is there, hop, hope, now: the meaning of the taste in my mouth. Bullshit. I am not interested in the frustration of interpretation; I am writing for readers who do not want to interpret. I do not know how many “professional readers” will hear the music of a paragraph like: Sun. Sushi. Volvo. I hope more than I would think. There is a suggestion (or rather, an actual production) of speed and infinitive owing to the absence of plosives, i.e. articulations such as /k/, /t/, or /p/. Can you hear the slick suaveness? Driving car dark, vocal chiaroscuro of the word “sushi.” The unstressed /i/ stands in the middle of dark vowels and thus acquires its own special out of focus , like a momentary flash or brilliance—an obscure light. It is not about recognizing a story, but about avoiding any story whatsoever: the car disappears in the glow, cars and raw fish have nothing in common except their articulation in a language that brings them together, blurring them. A world appears in its disappearance. For a moment, light is a metaphor for language, though it cannot be reduced to tenor. It is not necessary to be a linguist or philosopher to hear this—a “difficult” poem all too often becomes an allegory of its own impenetrable being-language. The only demand: leave your hermeneutical fetish at home. This was no interpretation. Most shit has been stolen etcetera. That is no longer interesting. You cannot shoot the body with information and let your lawyers reclaim the bullets. So every sentence has been stolen. Also the ones “out” “of” “my” “head.” Why would I be allowed to steal from myself and not from others? Man takes what he needs to move forward. Whatever he encounters, finds in front of him, “occurs” to him. The writer as text editor, or singing pirate. Nothing new here. Important difference with for example Sybren Polet’s 4 montage technique: anti-thematicism. Most of the time ferocious citation from whatever I was reading, listening to, ended up in, and so on. I wrote chapter 12 on my laptop while watching CNN. On the air instead of en plein air . I often employed search engines to generate material. Chapter 20 offers the purest example of this. Often I stop recognizing a particular citation after some time. It is not uncommon for a stolen sentence to conform itself to the paragraph in which it finds itself. Sometimes I nearly arbitrarily replace words. Arbitrariness as a guarantee for absolute democracy. It is a poetics of the non sequitur : a conclusion that does not follow from the premises, the strange element in the discourse. A discourse of strangers. No logical, narrative, thematic unity. There is unity in speed/flight. It has to be read linearly, but not necessarily (not preferably) from beginning to end. The shortest distance between two points is a straight line, but this line precedes every point. The middle, the acceleration, comes first. A point occurs where two lines cross. It has been written from up close, at the level of the tension between sentences. Nothing to be seen from a distance: no form except the exchange of form, no geometrical or mythical meaning. You have to get in, “groping toward a continuous present, a using everything a beginning again and again” (Stein). 5 In Dutch, experimental poetry has been mainly dense: a small rectangular form filled with a maximum amount of poetic possibility. But at the moment the poem starts to relax, the anecdotical content seems to increase. This is what is called “epic”: long, narrative. I believe that an epic is more than that, in fact something completely different. An epic is “a poem including history,” 6 a long poem tied up with the life of community, that as a whole does not need to be narrative. The American poets of the twentieth century (Pound, Williams, Zukofsky, Oppen, Olson, Silliman) have put the epic back on the map by interpreting the poem itself as a map, and writing it as navigation. They have invented the experimental epic, a genre that has generated little original following in “our” poetry. N30 is the middle part—“always start in the middle”—of a trilogy, the contours of which remain as of yet unclear, although each episode investigates one of the three “ecstasies of time”—past, present, future—concerning society X. N30 concerns itself with the PRESENT: not with the description of actual facts but of the rhythm and the intense depth in which facts appear to us. Where are we? We are camping in the desert. Sometimes we are looking at the stars. As opposed to maximum density and minimal tension (a characteristic of most (post-)experimental lyricism), I have sought a minimal density and maximum tension in this book, considered as a long non-narrative prose poem. On the one hand, the minimal density is obtained by the inherent formlessness of prose, on the other hand by the conscious refusal of any active (formal, non-rhythmic) synthesis: the poem tells nothing, shows nothing, has no theme. I did not seek maximum tension either by loading the quotidian with epiphanic radioactivity (“wonder,” confirmation from above), or by means of the intensity of the linguistic structure. I want an abstract tension, but social in its abstraction, in other words, not neutralized by and subjected to Form. Instead of form (transcendent): composition (immanent). The concept is series. Ideal: every unit is necessary for the efficacy of the others and the whole, their relation is purely linear, i.e. non-hierarchic, non-syllogistic, non-discursive, non-narrative. Sentence related to sentence like paragraph to paragraph and chapter to chapter; the whole means nothing and represents nothing. Inside the sentence: syntax (Chomsky’s tree, a type of parallel circuit), outside: parataxis (coordination, an asyntactic line through language and world). I consider duration—the energy of duration (rhythm)—to be the fundament of a poem, the temporal inclination to delimit a “space.” Being as consistency, its consistency. A spatial part of time is not merely a metaphor for an inevitable trajectory, an inescapable time, something like “our time.” Not merely—because rhythm comes from language and is not projected onto it; the poem derives from the world like a scent and a color and a life from a flower. A series, a sequence: nothing potential, but truly infinite—the movement of an infinitude. The infinite series = everything minus totality. That means that there is no container—no Form, no Self, no Image, no Structure, not even a Fragment—just “the prose of the world.” No representation, but also no staging of the impossibility of representation (the postmodern sublime). These are no fragments, no image of a fragmented world or personality, no cautious incantations around the Void. It does not exist. It is a movement. Buying bread, a flock of birds, a bomb falling—they do not depict or represent anything, not literally, not metaphorically. There is an Idea, which is however nothing more than a rhythm, in the same way that capitalism is nothing more than a pure function. Parataxis: the white space between two sentences stresses, which is nevertheless always there, also between words, even between letters: the out of focus of idle talk, the gutter, the irreducible Mallarméan mist which renders even the seemingly most transparent text legible. The white space suggests a neutral medium for free signification, a substance of language. A non sequitur is an element from a foreign discourse, which stresses the white space as space, and problematizes freedom for supra-sentential signification. I start by withdrawing material, leaving the initiative to the sentences. In general a word presupposes less often a discourse than a sentence. What discourse is presupposed by “dog”? We could think of several, but why would we? It is more probable that, when faced with the naked word, we think of its naked (dictionary) meaning, of its denotative signified. By means of two simple interventions we may also write the word as sentence: Dog. In no way this suggests the discourse from which this sentence originates, but in any case we’re presupposing one. This is shown by questions like: “Whose dog? Who’s a dog? What kind of dog?” Etc. (Sentences are question marks.) A sentence implies/is a microcosm—a subject, a verb, an object, and so on. Even an incomplete or ungrammatical sentence does so. My main fascination while writing this book is the worldly and social aspect of language, an aspect that often becomes invisible, or rather, transparent in narrativity—the stretching of sentences into stories. Narrativity organizes a new discourse and a new world, and places a sometimes all too dispersing relation of transparence in between. The conventional novel is the brothel of being. I do not intend to prohibit brothels, and I have certainly not intended to write an anti-novel (THIS IS A POEM), but I do consider narrativity (in general, in poetry, in the news, in daily life) to be ontologically secondary with regard to an immediate being in the world through sentences, also if the latter have been withdrawn from a narrative or otherwise externally structured discourse (which in that case would therefore be chronologically primary ). Naturally, two or more sentences are always in danger of telling stories or arguing, just like the world is always in danger of becoming an objective representation, facing us, strangers. That is why need to wage war—against representation and against the interface, against interaction. AGAINST THE “READER.” To the extent that a sentence is worldly, writing is a condensed global war, and in so far as there is ultimately only one world and one open continuum of languages, it is a global civil war. Nice subject for an epic. The elaboration of a singular problem—prose as the outside of poetry, the form of the novel as purely prosodic composition scheme—“expresses” the universal problem: capitalism as Idea of the world vs. poetry as language of an (im)possible community. The paragraphs are blocks of rhythmically contracted social material. By choosing the sentence as the basic compositional component, an abstract whole may contain social sounds, without telling a story or showing an image. Composition is subrepresentative —a rhythmic, passive synthesis, or rather: a synthesis of syntheses. I never write large blocks of prose in one sitting, because there is no obvious organizational vector —plot, theme, conscience—outside the inherent qualities of the material itself. Usually I write down one sentence, sometimes two, but rarely more than three. Those sentences are usually placed in the text which I am editing at the time. In fact, there is no original composition, new chapters split off from chapters which became too long during the editing process. (Revision mainly consists of adding and inserting, displacing and dividing; only during the last phase, when the text has gained enough consistency, there may be subtraction to tighten the composition; each chapter requires a season of daily revision). This constant revision, accompanied by a continuous influx of collective background noise (to speak with Van Bastelaere), 7 makes every chapter a block condensed (“historical” and “personal”) time. The block itself is a-personal and a-historic; it is ontologically autonomous. If there is such a thing as a spirit of the times, I do not try to offer an image of it, but rather to cancel something of it by erecting a monument of its own excrement within its own boundaries. Tuning and dis-tuning , “in de taal der neerslachtigen een eigen geluid doen klinken,” 8 in other words, desiring in an Elysian way. In this sense I have intended to be able to write a political poetry. The ultimate political poem is the epic, “the tale of the tribe.” I consider N30 to be a prolegomenon to a future epic (of which it in the end will form a part a structural moment, as introduction-in-the-middle), an extended pile on top of an epic as narrative, a question of the tribe and question of its history. I was burdened by too much satire, too much bullshit. But: satire willy-nilly = the only justifiable satire. Against the abstract universalism of the market (“globalism”): concrete disgust, a positive way of saying “No.” Moreover, disgust is a specifically total attitude, which ultimately concerns the world as a whole. I hate this or that, but I am disgusted by EVERYTHING (when I am disgusted), and so it appears that satire is in fact related to the epic, in so far as it concerns society, the cosmos, history. Maybe it is no coincidence that the Dutch literary canon knows no great poet of disgust; what could be more fearful to us than society, the cosmos, and history? The T-tendency (T from Tollens 9 ) clearly points into the direction of the small, friendly, ironic, melancholic, acquiescent, wondrous, and so on. The anti-political, anti-cosmic, anti-historical. (Why am I so philosophical? To scare away the Dutchies.) And most of all: the “poetical” (the pseudo-mysticism from the backyard). Yes, the N in N30 also stands for the Netherlands (just like 30 indicates the number of chapters). I was not in Seattle, I do not live in Iraq. But is not the whole world bleeding to death on Dutch paving stones? Let’s hope that we mowed away something with this total satire, also “in myself.” The arrogant stupidity that definitely thinks to know the essence of freedom (the free development of esthetic needs inside the void), that cannot take anything serious, only believes in the disciplined bestiality of the individual (“norms and values”) and the mere functioning of a social factory which finds no justification whatsoever outside its functioning (“get to work”)… Who knows. A certain aimed destruction leaves grooves and craters, mapping out a next adventure. Pound’s periplum : sailing while mapping the coasts. Immanent orientation. The terrain changes with the map, history changes with the poem. Maps never merely organize the chaos, transcendent schemes imposed on a formless Ding-an-sich . They organize from within, surfing. But they are most of all routes back into the chaos or forward to paradise (final identity of chaos and paradise; Schlegel: “ Nur diejenige Verworrenheit ist ein Chaos aus der eine Welt entspringen kann ”10). A poem is not only a piece of history, it is also a flight from history. Maps give chaos to the form of reality , open escape routes, break through representations, make us shivery and dazed. Paradise is immanent to a fleeting desire. History is the history of labor—this is Adam’s curse—and the poet works too: For to articulate sweet sounds together Is to work harder than all these, and yet Be thought an idler by the noisy set Of bankers, school masters, and clergymen The martyrs call the world 11 But: the poet works in paradise. The paradox of the artwork, the work that is no work, the piece of history that cannot be reduced to History—this is explained by The Space of Literature , a virtual space, an autonomous rhythm, not outside, but in the midst of the noise, a piece of paradise in hell, a postcard from the vale of tears addressed to paradise, to X. Political poetry means: a poetry that dares to think about itself, about its language and about its world and about the problematic relation between both, which is this relation as problem. A poetry that thinks at all, articulates its problem. It has nothing to do with journalism or morality or debate, let alone the law or the state. It has nothing to do with “criticism” if this means the replacement of incorrect representations by other, more correct representations. It has something to do with ethics in the sense of learning to live. It has something to do with the community and the language of the community (whichever that may be) and the role of the poet regarding the community. It concerns justice without judgement or measure. In the end the just word is just a word , to paraphrase Godard: it is from a future that is unimaginable. It Is no rational engagement, but an aversion against everything that obstructs life, and love for everything what is worthy of having been loved. The world is engaged with me, not the other way round. First Exodus, then Sinai. A desire does not start with an agenda. To answer the question whether I am really so naive as to want to change the world: “We only want the world.” Justice is the world appealing to us to liberate it from all possible chains, from each organization and inequality, to be it, smooth, equal, under a clear sky—a desert and a people in a desert. That moment between Egypt and the Law. It is not a revolution, but the sky above the revolution. Poetry = the science of escape. There is no art that we already know. The weakness of modernistic epic poetry seems to me to be the unwillingness to completely abandon narrative as a structural principle, in favor of a composition “around” or from an event. The China Cantos and Adams Cantos are the low point, and the Pisan Cantos the high point of Pound’s poetry. Two types of research: archival representation of the past vs. ontology of the present (which virtually presupposes the entire history). Presupposing an event means that it is impossible for the poet to stage his own absence, but in no way makes the work personal. An event is the unknown, the new invading into the business as usual, so also the personal. The question heading this research is not: “Who am I?” but “What is happening?” The book is as little illegible as Mondrian’s work is invisible. Form is of interest only to the extent that it empowers liberation. Ron Silliman So no formalism, but what it means to live in this world and to have a future in it. I want something that holds together that’s not smooth. Bruce Andrews The past above, the future below and the present pouring down: the roar, the roar of the present, a speech— William Carlos Williams If my confreres wanted to write a work with all history in its maw, I wished, from the beginning to start all over again, attempting to know nothing but a will to create, and matter at hand. Ronald Johnson NOTES 1) “The easy thing/ that is difficult to make.” Bertold Brecht, Lob des Kommunismus . (All footnotes are the translator’s) 2) Maurice Blanchot, The Space of Literature , trans. Ann Smock. Lincoln/London: University of Nebraska Press (1989), 75. 3) Mettes uses the word “Neerlandicus,” which refers to scholars of Dutch language and literature. 4) Dutch poet. 5) Gertrude Stein. “Composition as Explanation.” A Stein Reader . Ed. Ulla E. Dydo. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press (1993), 495-503. 6) Ezra Pound. 7) Flemish poet. 8) “Resounding an original sound in the language of the despondent.” A. Roland Holst, De afspraak . 9) Dutch poet. 10) “Only such a confusion is a chaos which can give rise to a world.” 11) W.B. Yeats, “Adam’s Curse.&rdquo. (shrink)

Although to the readers of Utopian Studies Darko Suvin remains perhaps best known for his criticism of science fiction, much of his recent writing has fallen into the category of Marxist political epistemology. Of note are In Leviathan's Belly: Essays for a Counter-Revolutionary Time (2012), his analysis of former Yugoslavia in Splendour, Misery, and Potentialities: An X-ray of Socialist Yugoslavia (2017) as well as a number of shorter works on subjects that range from the Russian Revolution to George Orwell's (...) Nineteen Eighty-Four. For decades, Suvin has also written (about) poetry: he discussed verse already in the 1979 The Metamorphoses of Science Fiction: On the Poetics and History of a Literary Genre and his... Read More. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Repetition in Latin Poetry: Figures of AllusionMichael C. J. PutnamJeffrey Wills. Repetition in Latin Poetry: Figures of Allusion. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996. xvi 1 506 pp. Cloth, $90.Wills offers the first fully systematic codification of repetition in Latin poetry. The introduction deals with the various means, such as morphological or lexical markings, word order, position and the like, that can help the reader distinguish allusion in an act (...) of repetition, and there follow several detailed examples of practice built on theory. But the main body of the book consists of a “grammar” of repetition.The first major segment is devoted to gemination, the repetition of identical forms within the same sense unit. This in turn is divided between a cataloguing of simple gemination, either in nominal form or of verbs and adverbs, and of expanded gemination, where one of the elements repeated is qualified with further detail. Four chapters are devoted to the next rubric, polyptoton and its elaborations, the repetitions of different forms within a simple clause. Then follow detailed discussions of the same phenomena but located across units, entitled “parallelism” where, as in the case of gemination, the forms are the same; and “modification,” akin to polyptoton in that the forms are different. The book concludes with three more general chapters devoted to a detailed analysis of the positional patterns repetition most regularly takes, of compounds as part of repetition, and to prosody and semantic variations in repetition.Such a bald summary does scant justice not only to the sheer quantity of material Wills gathers—a monumental accomplishment in itself—but also to the learning, intelligence and critical sophistication that characterize the undertaking. At the start Wills lays claim only to illustrating the process whereby allusion is generated through repetition, but throughout the whole enterprise, whether in theoretical discussions or in the practical criticism that emanates from his compendia, the results are equally valuable, for the investigation of individual poems and authors as well as for a deeper understanding of the development of Latin modes of imaginative expression, often as analyzed against their Greek intellectual background. If I were to focus on one single accomplishment beyond the mere careful, discrete amassing of material, it would be the stress not only on diction, that is, on the iteration of words, but on such categories [End Page 295] as form, syntax, and word placement in the creation of allusion through repetition. But the main value of this rich work will be as much in the detailed analyses of countless specific instances as in the manifold possibilities for referencing, and cross-referencing, across the history of classical poetry that now become readily available to its scholars.A good example of Wills’s methodology is his initial illustration (26–28), tracing how Virgil adopts and adapts Catullus’ repetitions of perfide, at the opening of Ariadne’s lament (64.132–33) and later (174), through the central reaches of Aeneid 4, from 305 to 421. But there are a myriad others of which I may single out only a few brief samples: on the connection of Cat. 62.20–24 and Vir. Ecl. 8.47–50 where chiasmus and parallel stanzaic structure reinforce repetition’s allusiveness (p. 181); on the repetition of acies at Aen. 10.360 in what Wills calls “battle polyptoton” (194); on the assumed communality of clashing horses (Aen. 11.614–15) and wrestling humans (Ov. Met. 6.243) that allusion from one text to another brings (199); on the connection between Aen. 3.156 and 10.670–72 and the resulting linkage of Aeneas and Turnus at moments of loss (267); on Virgil’s melding of Homeric syntax with Lucretian diction in the impressive phrase gravis graviterque (Aen. 5.447) (239); on the resulting combination of form as well as diction as Propertius borrows from both Ecl. 7.44 and Ecl. 6.55–58 to describe the cattle of Hercules (4.9.16–19) (101–2).From time to time Wills seems swept along by the fact of repetition to the neglect of counterevidence which would be useful to the reader in weighing the value of an exemplum. A case in point is the... (shrink)

History, according to Aristotle, relates "things that happen ; whereas poetry's function is to relate the kinds of things that happen—that is, are possible in terms of probability or necessity."1 A generic clause, expressing "the kinds of things that happen" to certain kinds of agents, distinguishes the task of the poet from that of the historian.2 History speaks of "particulars," whereas poetry speaks more of "universals." A historian might assert, for example, that Alcibiades urged the Athenians to invade (...) Sicily, or that he was later exiled, and finally murdered; whereas a poet would use Alcibiades's story to show the kind of person to whom things of that kind are likely or bound to... (shrink)

Benedetto Croce’s influence pervades Anglo-Saxon culture, but, ironically, before Giovanni Gullace heeded the call of his colleagues and provided this urgently needed translation of _La Poesia, _speakers of English had no access to Croce’s major work and final rendering of his esthetic theory.__ __ _Aesthetic, _published in 1902 and translated in 1909, represents most of what the English-speaking world knows about Croce’s theory. It is, asserts Gullace, “no more than a first sketch of a thought that developed, clarified, and corrected (...) itself through new literary experience and more mature reflection.” During the 34 years between _Aesthetic _and _La Poesia _, for example, Croce added a striking new element to his thought: the analysis of prose literature. Gullace’s introduction to _La Poesia _constitutes a major under­taking in its own right. It is aimed at acquainting the reader with the evolution of Croce’s thought and at explaining the relation­ship between this final work and the philosopher’s previous work in esthetic theory and literary criticism. __ _La Poesia _is divided into two parts, text and postscripts. The text consists of four chapters: Poetry and Literature; The Life of Poetry; Criticism and History of Poetry; and The Formation of the Poet and the Precepts. Croce saw the postscripts “as a re­laxed conversation after the tension of theoretical exposition. In Gullace’s translation the text and relevant postscripts appear conveniently side by side in a double column. Gullace has anno­tated both text and postscripts. (shrink)

Nasir-i Khusraw is a major literary figure in medieval Persian culture. He was a Muslim philosopher, poet, travel writer, and Ismaili da'i who lived a thousand years ago in the lands known today as Afghanistan, Iran, and Tajikistan. Although known in the West mainly for his Safarnama, or travelogue, which describes his seven-year journey from Khurasan, in the eastern Islamic lands, to Cairo, the city of the Fatimid imam-caliphs, his poetry and ideas are less familiar. Yet, over the centuries, Persian-speaking (...) lands have consistently ranked him as one of the finest poets of all time. But today, even among those who know Nasir-i Khusraw's poetry, few understand the philosophical and Ismaili concepts the poet expounds. And while mystical and epic genres of Persian poetry are memorized and studied, the genre of philosophical poetry in Persian remains basically unexplored. This collection of studies seeks to redress the balance. Originally presented at a conference at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London in 2005 to commemorate the millenary of Nasir-i Khusraw's birth, the papers published here examine his poetry both for philosophical meaning and poetic method. They address a variety of topics, ranging from metaphysics, cosmology, and ontology to prophecy, as well as rhythm and structure, and analysis of individual poems and authorship. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reflections on Beardsley's AestheticsProblems in the Philosophy of CriticismDonald Crawford (bio)Monroe Beardsley's Aesthetics was published the year I was a junior philosophy major at the University of California, Berkeley, and by the end of that academic year, I had completed semester courses in the history of ancient as well as modern philosophy, logic, ethics, and the philosophy of religion. The requirements remaining for me in philosophy in my (...) senior year were a course in either epistemology or metaphysics, plus five elective philosophy courses. I had fairly developed interests in literature, especially poetry, classical music, film, and the visual arts, so it seemed natural for me to select a course in aesthetics as one of my remaining electives. Nonetheless, I had no idea what aesthetics was. When I looked up the word in the dictionary, I found the following definition: "The branch of philosophy dealing with beauty or the beautiful, especially in the fine arts." Even today, the Berkeley philosophy course catalog entry for aesthetics simply says, as it did then, "Aesthetics: Visual arts/literature and music. Form, expression, representation, style; interpretation and evaluation."Interpretation and evaluation sounded worth pursuing. At that time I had no doubt that almost any music by Bach was better than that by Offenbach, that Van Gogh's Starry Night was in a different class than Norman Rockwell's covers for the Saturday Evening Post, or that Bergman's The Seventh Seal (1957) was a far better film than Attack of the Crab Monsters of the same year. And I was fully convinced that some poems lent themselves to more interesting and profound readings—that is, interpretations—than others and therefore were better poems. So a course that dealt with the interpretation and evaluation of the visual arts, literature, and music was enticing. The class lectures were rather dull, however, and I began to have regrets for enrolling. Besides, the required text was brand new and had several drawbacks: there were no used copies available so it was expensive ($7.50!), and its 591 pages were bound in hardback and heavy. [End Page 19]Yes, the text was Beardsley's Aesthetics, and my now well-worn copy is complete with my original revealing and indelible underlines that remind me of my naiveté. I recall being immediately struck by the book's epigraph—a quotation from David Hume: "I am uneasy to think I approve of one object, and disapprove of another; call one thing beautiful, and another deform'd; decide concerning truth and falsehood, reason and folly, without knowing upon what principles I proceed." This encouraged me to think that this book and course would teach me the principles that underlay my unreasoned critical comparative evaluations of poems, films, and other works of art. Was this false optimism? After glancing at the table of contents, I quickly turned to chapter 10, "Critical Evaluation," where I read on page 454: "The problems to which we now come have been put off as long as possible in the hope that a circumspect approach would make them more vulnerable." I wasn't quite sure what that meant ("vulnerable" to what?), but it seemed to imply that it was necessary to start at the beginning of the book.1 So I did just that. To my delight, almost immediately, on page 3, Beardsley provided his definition of "aesthetics," saying: "[A]esthetics consists of those principles that are required for clarifying and confirming critical statements. It can be thought of, then, as the philosophy of criticism, or metacriticism" (3-4; emphasis in the original). Unless by "critical statement" Beardsley meant judgments of beauty, this didn't really correspond with either Webster's definition or the course description of aesthetics. Beardsley's concept of a critical statement was much broader than that in common use today, and it reflected the attitude of the founders of the American Society for Aesthetics, who named their journal the Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism (JAAC). Beardsley said he would be "using the term 'critical statement,' very broadly, to refer to any statement about a work of art" (3) and that a critical statement "need not be a value judgment at... (shrink)

Miller undermines traditional ideas and beliefs about language, literature, truth, meaning, consciousness, and interpretation. In effect, he assumes the role of unrelenting destroyer—or nihilistic magician—who dances demonically upon the broken and scattered fragments of the Western tradition. Everything touched soon appears torn. Nothing is ever finally darned over, or choreographed for coherence, or foregrounded as magical illusion. Miller, the relentless rift-maker, refuses any apparent repair and rampages onward, dancing, spell-casting, destroying all. As though he were a wizard, he appears in (...) the guise of a bull-deconstructer loose in the china shop of Western tradition. Vincent B. Leitch, associate professor of English at Mercer University, is the editor of Robert Southwell's Marie Magdalens Funeral Teares and The Poetry of Estonia: Essays in Comparative Analysis. Sections of the present essay will appear in his The Poetics of Deconstruction, which offers a critical history and anatomy of deconstructive criticism. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:An Undeleter for CriticismSimon Jarvis (bio)Is there experience of beauty, or is it only that we sometimes choose to sort and name certain experiences by using a set of terms, originating often in ancient and medieval philosophy and theology and by a long process of mutation and manipulation arriving under the disciplinary heading of "aesthetics"? This question asks for at least two kinds of information. It does not only (...) ask for information about the history of the formation of the concepts of aesthetics; it also asks for information about experiences. But information about experiences is hard to come by. This is not only, perhaps, for the large reason that "information is concerned with alien objects," rather than with experiences,1 but also for the more local one that "aesthetics" does not often attempt to describe any experiences with determined fidelity.2I can illustrate this with reference to a branch of aesthetics in which I have a particular interest, the aesthetics of prosody. A good deal of subtle and sometimes brilliant work exists in this field. It is rare, however, to find writing which describes in any detail the particular experiences which a particular living individual has had in relation to a line of poetry.3 One is much more likely to find such descriptions in works of fiction (or, rarely, in brief reviews) than in professional writing on the topic of prosody. There seem at first to be some obvious and good reasons for this. Professional writing demands not that we merely report our own subjective experiences, but that we produce knowledge. Critics are not paid to be artists but to be a kind of scientists of art. But what if there is no such science? What if "there is no science of the beautiful" [Kant, CJ 172]? Would that mean that the whole subject area should simply be—deleted?That this is a possibility is confirmed by the fact that in one area of thinking about aesthetic experience, it has almost happened already. While there are still a number of paid professionals who understand part of their vocation to be bound up with investigating the experience of the beauty or other value of works of art, there are few paid aestheticians of nature.4 There have been historical periods in which numbers of printed nonfiction [End Page 3] texts were devoted both to experiences of natural beauty and also to the relative propensity of natural appearances to occasion such experiences. Such descriptions are now thought to be, insofar as they are of interest at all, the province of artists.5 This is indeed a consequence of something like an acceptance that, in the sphere of experiences of nature, at least, "there is no science of the beautiful." Most agree that "an ideal of a beautiful view is unthinkable" [CJ 80]. Yet few, perhaps, would now argue that an ideal of a beautiful poem is quite thinkable either.We are thus returned to the question posed above. If there is no science of the beautiful, must claims to experiences of beauty be treated as fictional—in the specific sense that they are matters for fiction, and not for science? Why should the concept not be altogether eliminated?Perhaps for this reason. Let us imagine that I think I have had an experience. I have been walking along a street at night, say, head down as though scrutinizing the quite complex surface of tarmacadam, kerbstone, painted parking and motoring instructions, drain covers and grilles, although perhaps in distraction I may have been allowing my eyes simply to pass lightly over all this while I think about a mortifying remark addressed to me at a recent committee meeting, or attempt to identify the catalogue number relevant to a fragment of piano music which has come into my head; may, for example, as if startled by a call or a cry of pain have raised my look from the wet pavement—which I now possibly "see" for the first time (since it is the soul which sees, and not the eye [Descartes 1: 172])—and now indeed see at a great distance ahead of me, almost at the horizon of... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Ideas 62.1 (2001) 1-16 [Access article in PDF] The Plot of History from Antiquity to the Renaissance Eric MacPhail In the Poetics Aristotle introduced the notion of plot or mythos as a distinctly poetic form of rationality and coherence absent from history. In the course of antiquity and the Renaissance Aristotle's notion of plot underwent a curious inversion by which (...) class='Hi'>history came to supplant poetry as the main literary form of emplotment. To account for the readjustment or even reversal of Aristotle's distinction between history and poetry, we will examine the notions of order, causality, and chance expounded by classical historians and literary theorists before tracing their influence to Renaissance writers. In the Renaissance the transmission, conflation, and distortion of Aristotelian doctrine exerted a profound influence on historiography and literary criticism, particularly in the latter part of the sixteenth century. It is even possible to understand some of the new and hybrid forms of Renaissance fiction as a reaction to this transference of the idea of plot from poetry to history. While history may indeed possess no coherent plot, as Aristotle speculated, literary history can nevertheless reconstitute the genealogy of competing notions of plot and order in Renaissance narrative.We can situate Aristotle's definition of plot in the context of his inquiry into cause and coincidence. In book two of the Physics Aristotle proposes a rigorous typology of cause, distinguishing between formal, material, efficient, and final causes, and he also considers the status of chance and fortune as accidental causes or aitia kata symbebekos (197a5-6). 1 The Metaphysics takes up the question of to kata symbebekos, translated alternately as accident or coincidence, and in doing so develops several arguments that pertain to the treatment of plot in the Poetics and to the larger issue of the coherence of fiction and history. As Richard Sorabji points out, the key to Aristotle's notion of coincidence is the [End Page 1] paradox of existence without genesis or without coming into being. 2 Metaphysics VI, 2 maintains that "of things which are in other senses there is generation and destruction [genesis kai phthora], but of things which are accidentally [kata symbebekos] there is not" (1026b24). Metaphysics VI, 3 argues that if this were not so, if nothing existed without genesis, then everything would be of necessity in the sense that every future event could be traced back to a present cause. Genesis thus seems to signify an unbroken chain of causes while to symbebekotos, the coincidental, represents a break in the causal chain. For Aristotle the coincidental or the fortuitous "goes back to some starting point (arche), which does not go back to something else" (1027b12-14). A coincidence is an uncaused cause.Aristotle's Poetics furnishes a definition of plot or mythos that provides a link between the metaphysical discussion of cause and the fictional inquiry into chance. For Aristotle the dramatic plot is the integration of various actions, or synthesis ton pragmaton (1450a5), into a whole or olon consisting of a beginning, a middle, and an end (1450b27). The unity of action does not admit of any accidents within the plot as it moves continuously from beginning to middle to end, and yet the plot as a whole exemplifies the metaphysical notion of a coincidence. Aristotle defines the beginning of the plot or the arche as "that which does not itself follow anything by causal necessity but after which something naturally is or comes to be" (1450b28-29). Thus the mythos, like the coincidence, originates in an uncaused cause, that scandal abhorred by rationalism. Aristotle further complicates the question of causality when he denies to historical events the type of probability or necessity that he associates with dramatic actions. Chapter 23 of the Poetics exhorts the epic poet to emulate tragedy and shun the example of histories (1459a17-22), for while historical events may possess a chronological unity, they do not form any causal chain and thus do not exhibit any unity of action.In chapter 9 of the Poetics Aristotle... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:A Defense of Poetry: Reflections on the Occasion of WritingJack KolbA Defense of Poetry: Reflections on the Occasion of Writing, by Paul H. Fry; 256 pp. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995, $45.00 cloth, $16.95 paper.And the worm turns. It might elicit dubious laughter from those Yale critics who taught Paul Fry, now William Lampson Professor at their institution, by his admission a Berkeley student in the 1960s (and (...) still, clearly, trying to come to terms with the absolutism of his era), to have him (a)rise to the occasion of verse. After all, the question he asks at the outset of his study—“how are we to account for all the poetry, not to mention fiction, not to mention all the criticism... that still gets written?”—seems anathema except to us academic conservatives, those who resent the encroachment of sterile philosophic approaches into literature. And irrelevant to those writers who don’t give a damn about academic criticism. Fry’s reality, and not just his literary reality, here confronts the weight of academia.What is most troublesome to me about this worthy book is the vast prolegomena that seems, alas, de rigueur these days, the critical dross that Fry must apparently spend an inordinate amount of time attempting to placate, dodge, and negotiate. If academic criticism must perform such elaborate obeisance to questionable philosophies of literature, then academic criticism is truly dead. No reason to grieve: it will be replaced by those who seek to understand and relish literature, still informed by the worthy questions of imitation and audience and authorial psychology, and even internal construction that have enticed readers for centuries.Fry is anything but a happy deconstructionist. One senses immediately that he is distinctly discontented with theoretical discourse, that what he really wants to discuss is poetry, and the poetic impulse. And when he does, he does it brilliantly. Indeed, it is only his argument that inhibits him. To oversimplify (an inevitable process in this book), Fry wants to rescue some poetry from the self-destructiveness, as he sees it, of sterile critical approaches—mostly from the neo-historicists, but also from all others who would deny the essential job of poetry to replicate reality. Both human and historical values have got in the way [End Page 522] of this “pure” conveyance. Somehow poetry (unique of the arts) can escape this:It is the function of indication, of saying that something just is (to which until now I have confined my notion of ostension), to estrange utterance from its historical situation by refusing to say that that something is predicated upon, determined by, something else, whether in narrative, description, or explanation....This is the moment, completing the structure of ostension, which reduces the estranged, necessarily “situated” utterance to sound and trace, and thus returns it to the unsignifying sphere of actuality, of things in themselves, from which history for its part is by nature forever estranged. Literature, then, is that mode of utterance which lays bare the irreducible distance between history and actuality from the parti pris of the latter. By suspending our purposeful engagement with the world, it reattaches itself to the world.(pp. 54–55)No single passage can do Fry justice, for his approach is accretive, and fearsomely intelligent (this is one of the few books of contemporary criticism I’ve read in which I felt that the awful vocabulary was merited). Yet, ultimately, Fry’s ontology sounds very much like old-fashioned mimesis; it is the universality of experience, he asserts, that escapes the historicist or the dogmatist or the deconstructionist. At some level poetry is what it is. In fact what Fry seemingly wants is in his terms an obliteration of the mediation of mimesis: his true poetry wants to be reality, or at least as close as we come to it in art.Of course the problem with this definition of poetry is that it is, despite Fry’s twistings and turnings, a definition of poetry. Poetry, as even Plato tells us, is an imitation. So how do we try to get closest to reality? With poetry, Fry suggests; poetry that acknowledges the universal reality... (shrink)

Sontag is certainly attracted to the aesthetic she describes but not so wholeheartedly as many readers have assumed.1 One of the ironies of her career has been her reputation as an enthusiast for works toward which she actually expresses considerable ambivalence. Many of her essays include overt advocacy, but it is rarely uncomplicated or uncompromised.2 Despite her reputation for partisanship, she more typically begins her essays by recounting an experience of alienation, annoyance, uncertainty, or shock. For example, she describes the (...) "happening" as an event "designed to tease and abuse the audience"3 and speaks of the "profoundly discouraging," even "hopeless," emotions of her first days in North Vietnam. She is, therefore, often motivated by her sense of difference from the event or object she describes. But it is not her wish merely to find ways of assimilating and dominating unpleasant or alien experience; while that is certainly one of the main impulses in her work - to control apparently impossible subjects, to exhilarate in the Nietzschean will to power over the text - her will to power is always countered by a need to credit and honor the text's otherness. Sontag never finally assumes an easy familiarity with her subject but rather draws its difficult and negating otherness ever closer to herself. Her work may be understood, in a way, as a search for a text that is utterly unknowable, a text that will always elude and contradict what we may say about it, a text, in short, that cannot be contaminated by critical rhetoric. That is a quality she has recently attributed to Artaud's work: "Like Sade and Reich, Artaud is relevant and understandable, a cultural monument, as long as one mainly refers to his ideas without reading much of his work. For anyone who reads Artaud through, he remains fiercely out of reach, an unassimilable voice and presence."4 · 1. There is, to be sure, an atmosphere of iconoclasm and intellectual challenge about Sontag's criticism, but it is not especially self-congratulatory. She is only interested in difficult topics or in topics whose difficulties have been repressed, partly because that context energizes her mind and partly, as she has written of Diane Arbus, because she wants "to violate her own innocence, to undermine her sense of being privileged" · 2. The exception is some of the early reviews included in Against Interpretation, where the polemical requirements of the occasion distinguish those brief judgments from her more careful and extended pieces.· 3. Sontag, Against Interpretation , p. 267.· 4. Sontag, "Artaud," Antonin Artaud: Selected Writings , p. lix. Cary Nelson teaches critical theory at the University of Illinois. He is the author of The Incarnate Word: Literature as Verbal Space and Our Last First Poets: Vision and History in Contemporary American Poetry and Reading Criticism: The Literary Status of Critical Discourse. (shrink)

Thucydides excuses the possible dullness of his history on the ground that he means it not for a passing entertainment but for a ‘permanent possession’ which may be of practical use in future times when some similar situation occurs again. We tend to smile at the idea. We all know that history never repeats itself. But surely we know also that though exactly the same situation or problem never recurs, yet elements are constantly recurring which, in different contexts, (...) with all sorts of different accompaniments, are essentially the same; and though, obviously, the old parallel never provides an answer to the new problem, it may well help to its understanding. The differences between any problem of ours and those of Thucydides are of course enormous. Our civilisation, immense in scale, dazzling in its scientific inventions and its power over matter, is extremely different from the small-scale city state of fifth-century Athens with no electricity, no gas, no steam, no buttons, no drainage even, and a standard of food and comfort which would produce instantaneous strikes in any Western community. Yet the essential situation which Thucydides had to face was the overthrow of a very high and peculiar civilisation by a long and all-absorbing war, a war to which men could find no end, from which they could never keep aloof, and under whose influence they found themselves sinking to standards of barbarism which filled them with horror. We in modern Europe share the experience of that sort of war; and we share perhaps more fully than any age between that time and our own the special quality of that civilisation. How can we find words to describe it? It was a free civilisation, proud of its freedom of life and thought, its advance in knowledge, art, literature; with flourishing commerce, with wide command of the sea, with an acknowledged superiority over ‘barbaric’ or non-Greek communities and over some that were Greek; and open, evidently, to the kind of criticism that is always provoked by a combination of commercial wealth and high culture, of democracy and empire. Thucydides has left us a wonderful picture of Athens, not of course exactly as she was but as she conceived herself to be or as she was in the eyes of those who loved her. It is not quite as we now see her; to us, living two thousand years afterwards, Athens is chiefly remarkable for its ever-living achievements in art, philosophy, and poetry; but Thucydides hardly mentions such things, though in one famous half-sentence, ‘We seek beauty without luxury’, he doubtless implies them. He writes not as a critic of art or poetry; and his philosophy is only the philosophy of a statesman. (shrink)

Aristotle’s claim that poetry is ‘a more philosophic and better thing’ than history (Poet 9.1451b5-6) and his description of the ‘poetic universal’ have been the source of much scholarly discussion. Although many scholars have mined Poetics 9 as a source for Aristotle’s views towards history, in my contribution I caution against doing so. Critics of Aristotle’s remarks have often failed to appreciate the expository principle which governs Poetics 6-12, which begins with a definition of tragedy and then elucidates (...) the terms of that definition by means of a series of juxtapositions. The juxtaposition between poetry and history is one such instance which seeks to elucidate what sort of plot exemplifies a causal unity such that the events of a play unfold with likelihood or necessity. Within that context, Aristotle compares history and poetry in order to elucidate the object of poetic mimesis rather than criticize history as a discipline. Viewing Aristotle as antagonistic towards history fails to appreciate the expository structure of the Poetics and obscures the resource which history provides to the poet, a point which I explore by considering what Aristotle would have thought of an ‘historical’ tragedy like Aeschylus’ Persians. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Birth-Mark: Unsettling the Wilderness in American Literary HistoryC. S. SchreinerThe Birth-Mark: Unsettling the Wilderness in American Literary History, by Susan Howe; 189 pp. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1993, $40.00.In the interview which concludes The Birth-Mark, Susan Howe says that during childhood her Boston household was visited by such pioneers of American studies as Perry Miller and F. O. Matthiessen. Career-wise, however, Howe’s path to academia has (...) be en indirect: born in 1937, she gained her first professorship in 1989 in the Poetics Program at SUNY Buffalo. A visual artist by [End Page 192] training, Howe veered into a genre of writing in the 1970s that seeks to “install certain narrativ es somewhere between history, mystic speech, and poetry” (p. 44). Her poetry includes Secret History of the Dividing Line (1978), Pythagorean Silence (1982), and Defenestration of Prague (1983). In 1985 she published an original criti cal study, My Emily Dickinson, which criticized editors for having homogenized the format and typography of Dickinson’s manuscripts, taming the unruly rigor of poems which were originally “multifaceted visual and verbal productions.” Howe also argu ed that the Amherst poet should not be viewed as a victim of repression, as many feminists see her, but as a refuser of congregations, a powerful will-to-reclusion in art—“One unchosen American women alone at home and choosing.” Emily’s home was a nomadi c space between orthodoxies.An understanding of Howe’s kinship with Dickinson’s poetic daring is helpful for reading The Birth-Mark, whose prose is poetic, and whose protagonist, Mary Rowlandson, shared Dickinson’s “stubborn strength in isolation.” The captivity narratives ar e portals into the antinomian controversy of New England, which was “the primordial struggle of North American literary expression” (p. 4). It is not Gilbert and Gubar to whom Howe has recourse in her analyses of hostage consciousness. She cites the philo sophy of Emmanuel Lévinas. As with feminism, which she extends rather than follows, Howe takes up the philosophy of alterity without its orthodoxy. (In the face of frontier brutality she cannot discern the “Father of orphans and defender of widows” of Psalm 68.) Encounters in the wilderness of tribes, woods, and waters aroused an immodest otherness within the American literary unconscious, unsettling the styles of expression and selfhood which the puritan colonies were trying to instantiate. The literary awakening of Dickinson, Rowlandson, Melville, Hawthorne, and other writers was not due to the Great Awakening urged by churches, but to the traumatic transfer of sovereignty from God to frontier, a permanent revolution to which these writers’ imaginations would remain exposed.Howe’s new foray into criticism tracks the textual marginalia which yield the visionary utterances of Rowlandson and Hutchinson. A self-confessed “library cormorant,” Howe gathers a quiet spectacle of testimonies, those of separated loved ones dragged int o “Removes” by tribes of Native Americans. These resonant texts from New England village libraries and major collections at Harvard, are melded together by Howe’s intuitive, almost telepathic sensibility into a kind of spiritual drama informed by critical acumen. Howe takes her bearings from Patricia Caldwell’s essay “The Antinomian Language Controversy,” which appeared in the Harvard Theological Review in 1976. The dislocating frontier experience for Hutchinson, Rowlandson, and others forced the c reation of a different language. It is with this antinomian language that Howe develops a sensitive rapport, echoing its myriad haunting voices in her commentaries. What Gadamer calls effective history broods and rustles inside her [End Page 193] writing with lyrical unease. Indeed, Howe’s work is a creative example of the fusion of horizons which Gadamer says epitomizes the hermeneutic event. Howe’s personal method as revealed in her interview: “Not to explain the work, not to trans late it, but to meet the work with writing... Not just to write a tribute, but to meet her [Dickinson] in the tribute. And that’s a kind of fusion” (p. 158). Some scholars will find her method obscure. But it’s hard to find anything negative at this height. Howe would have us meet others at their most exposed, delicate point, where their vulnerability... (shrink)

Self-discipline, ethics, character, and philosophy in Hindu poetry; criticism to Bhagavad Gita, Nītīśāstra, Sāra-samuccaya, etc.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:John Robert Leo CRITICISM OF CONSCIOUSNESS IN SHELLEY'S A DEFENCE OF POETRY IN his "Ode to Liberty" Shelley locates by encircling and enfolding metaphors a mythic Hellenic moment, one in which verse was yet "speechless" and philosophy still burdened with "lidless eyes." Greece— always for Shelley either the displaced Garden of prethematic unity or the mythic dream of integrated civic and aesthetic life—is about to inaugurate Athens and (...) the "wrinkled image" of historical consciousness.1 Poetry, thinking, and the tilling of an earth "to human use" are implicitly related and foreseen as destiny: from their enchanted caves Prophetic echoes flung dim melody. On the unapprehensive wild The vine, the corn, the olive mild, Grew savage yet, to human use unreconciled; And, like unfolded flowers beneath the sea, Like the man's dark thought in the infant's brain, Like aught that is which wraps what is to be, Art's deathless dreams lay veiled by many a vein Of Parian stone; and, yet a speechless child, Verse murmured, and Philosophy did strain Her lidless eyes for thee... (11. 49-60). Shelley could be describing the reading or speaking of a text, for poetic experience is an originating moment which unfolds our reflections and anticipations. Poetry elides speechlessness and the empty gaze. Its goings are all returnings, its experience is always inventive before meanings codify and resolve: "Every original language near to its source," we find in the Defence (p. 279), "is in itself the chaos of a cyclic poem; the copiousness of lexicography and the distinctions of grammar are the works of a later age and are merely the catalogue and the form of the creations of poetry." What was dark to experience is now illumined, 46 John Robert Leo47 as different regions in experience are uncovered or redistributed by language across our shifting horizons. Thus this bringing-foward-intoclarity, this moving of the previously inexpressed into articulation, is the pattern not only behind Shelley's view ofGreece producing a "sun-fire garlanded" Athens (1. 68), but also the more pervasive design describing other regarded experience. James Edie puts it this way: "We... can learn to make distinctions in our experience by attending to differences of meaning which are normally below the level of our own cultural threshold. By attending to a given region of experience, we can lower the differential thresholds already sedimented in our language almost indefinitely and make what was implicit in our experience more and more explicit."2 Edie's comments may be taken as responses to questions emerging from modernist readings of Shelley and other visionary poets—Blake, Hart Crane, or Charles Olson are instances—who sense the poetic project as a criticism of consciousness, within the lived body, as it struggles to make a world. How do language and the imagination consort in the critical regeneration of our lives? In what sorts of ways is renascence the uncovering and unfolding of an indefinite wholeness by the unlayering of fixed habits and attitudes? How does Shelley's Defence of Poetry, both a text on aesthetics and a reading of the world, suggest their alignment? What methods from critical discourse make Shelley's poetics present to our experience and thought? The adjustment of these issues is the task of the remainder of my article. First I examine Shelley's organization of consciousness into "reason" and "imagination" and trace the meanings of these functions in their immediate social context. A brief dispute with the reductive idealism of Platonic tradition allows for my third procedure, which is a phenomenological description of the imaginative field according to Husserl. Finally, I try to explicate Shelley's understanding of imaginative "decentering" within our experience. I Poetry and prose are saturated with references to phenomena. Texts refer to interior and exterior events (memory, rain), which are objects ofandfor consciousness. Shelley grasps this co-givenness of consciousness and world, their correlativity, as a condition revealed and strengthened by metaphor, which itself arrests us as "that of which we are speaking through words."3 But if it is the nature of language to be both perceptual and yet transcendental, both present and absent, it still exists as the imagination's voice in... (shrink)

Duncan traces the renewed interest in the poetry of Donne, Herbert, Marvell, and others, among poets and critics during the past century and a half.--L. S. F.

Poetry, fiction, literary history, and politics. These four cornerstone concerns of Roberto Bolaño's work have established him as a representative, generational figure in not only Chile, Mexico, and Spain, the three principal locations of his life and work, but throughout Europe and the Americas, increasingly on a global scale. At the heart of Bolaño's 'poemas-novela', his poet- and poetry-centered novels, is the history and legacy of the prose poem. Challenging the policing of boundaries between verse and prose, poetry (...) and fiction, the literary and the non-literary, the aesthetic and the political, his prose poem novels offer a sustained literary history by other means, a pivotal intervention that restores poetry and literature to full capacity. Framing Roberto Bolaño is one of the first books to trace the full arc and development of Bolaño's work from the beginning to the end of his career. (shrink)